At the close of his reign, Fernando III had acquired a vast array of territories, including Leon and Leonese Extremadura, southern La Mancha, the southern extremities of New Castile, and large portions of the heartland of Al-Andalus, including its great cities of Córdoba, Jaén and Seville. The kingdoms of Murcia, Niebla and Granada lay under tribute to Castile. The Primera Crónica General relates the death bed scene of Fernando III, when this Castilian Cyrus, whose imminent demise would end his hopes of extending his victories to North Africa, counseled his son Alfonso to preserve those things he had won, and if possible, to extend them. Should the heir apparent lose any of this great store of lands and vassals, Fernando charged his son, then "you will be a lesser king than I."⁽¹⁾

Prince Alfonso came to the throne personally experienced in the matter of combat and conquest in his own right. Active in the armies of his father since the siege of Córdoba, he had been the commander in charge during the reduction of much of Murcia to its tributary status. If holding onto the lands of his father and adding some territories to that amalgamation were the only standards necessary to meet San Fernando's criteria of "greater kingship", Alfonso X met that test. However, the reality was far more complex and demanding than the one the royal chronicle depicts. The historical situation demanded that Alfonso X play the Darius to Fernando's Cyrus, that he pull together and synthesize the sprawling kingdom of Castile. As king of Castile, Toledo, Leon, Galicia, Seville, Córdoba, Murcia, Jaén and Badajoz (many of [69] these the titles of former Muslim princedoms in the Peninsula), Fernando had assembled a state from areas with strong regional identities, some with Muslim population majorities. The real task he bequeathed to Alfonso was the structuring of this diverse realm into a solid thirteenth-century state. His great cultural attainments notwithstanding, historians have tended to measure Alfonso X's achievement with much debate and disagreement, based on the extent to which he consolidated Castile and built for its future.⁽²⁾

Alfonso X's neighboring rulers in Aragon and Portugal were not without their tasks to complete. While consolidating his newly acquired Valencian lands, Jaime had to be aware of the uncertain stability of the Muslim vassal state of Murcia to his southwest. Then, following the conquest of Murcia by his neighbor Alfonso X, King Jaime had to consider his future expansion as increasingly circumscribed within the Peninsula, unless he wished to make war on Castile. The Murcian revolt and the continuing sea contact between Al-Andalus and North Africa indicated that threats and opportunities from this direction remained. But for the time being, the Aragonese reconquest was drawing to a close, and the king had to consider the policies of consolidation of the federated kingdoms which he had vastly expanded and enriched by his conquests, especially Valencia. Like Alfonso, Jaime would develop an interest in exploiting the possibilities of Roman law to unify his realm and would found a university to undertake the training of a governmental elite. While Afonso III did not yet take up Roman law or university creation, he did have the task of completing the conquest of the Algarve and then securing unrestrained title to it from Alfonso X. The uncertain status of Niebla and Cádiz permitted a possible push of the Portuguese frontier beyond the Guadiana.

Although it may not have been completely clear to these three contemporary monarchs, the shape of their frontiers was rapidly hardening into final position. For Portugal and Aragon, this meant internal consolidation remained the primary task. For Castile, the consolidation of a large and diverse kingdom had to be accomplished in the face of a continuing threat of Muslim warfare. Indeed, all three states were decades from the completion of the most basic goals of internal unity. All three monarchies had particularly to consider the status of the institutions created to facilitate the expansion of the frontier. In such an age of transition, the municipalities and the policies of the peninsular monarchs toward them offer indications of the kinds of stress and change being encountered by the towns and their militias.
 
 

In many ways Castile had reached a critical point in its municipal military evolution. Both the reuniting of Castile and Leon under Fernando III in 1230 and the headlong rush from the central Meseta into Andalusia with the conquest of Córdoba, Jaén, Murcia and Seville had [70] burdened the kingdom with an incredible period of growth. Alfonso inherited a southern frontier that reached from the mouth of the Guadiana in the west to the port of Alicante in the east. The entire Muslim frontier was now encompassed within the Castilian state. Since Fernando III had acquired his conquests piecemeal and had devoted the bulk of his energies to further expansion rather than the internal organization, Alfonso had to contend with the dual challenges of internal consolidation and frontier momentum. One method of dealing with these goals was to attempt the creation of a body of law by which his entire realm might be governed. This involved the creation of several different legal compilations including the Espéculo, the Fuero real, possibly the Fuero sobre elfecho de las cabalgadas, and finally culminating in Las siete partidas.⁽³⁾ While this attempt at unifying all the law of Castile in an organized body infused with the principles of Roman law did bring into Castilian legal tradition a new direction destined to have great impact in the Later Middle Ages, the resistance of Alfonso's countrymen meant that these experiments were likely to be little more than "constitutions under glass" for the next century. Meanwhile, a far more basic and confusingly diverse type of resource would have to be utilized in dealing with the towns, the assorted regional fueros of his kingdom.

Clearly the king did not regard the combats with the Muslims as a thing of the past, and granted fueros with military service requirements throughout his state. For municipal law of a more general nature, there were at least three fuero traditions to which Alfonso X could have turned: Coria Cima-Coa, Cuenca-Teruel and Toledo-Córdoba. Alfonso made no use of the fuero pattern which had appeared at the end of the twelfth century with the Coria Cima-Coa formulary in Leonese Extremadura of which we are aware. Instead, the king intended Extremadura as one of the zones into which he would implant his new initiative in municipal legislation and military requirements.

He might also have opted for the most extensive statement of military requirements made prior to his reign, that appearing in the Cuenca-Teruel family of charters which multiplied toward the end of the twelfth century in the reign of el Sabio's great-uncle, Alfonso VIII. This set of municipal laws had subsequently spread south and west of the Iberian Cordillera across eastern Castile, La Mancha and upper Andalusia, with two exceptional western outposts at Plasencia and later at Béjar. While it appears that Alfonso X gave copies of this fuero to Villa Real in 1255, to Requena in 1257, and to Almansa in 1265, in none of these cases does the text survive.

Alfonso's Crónica discusses the military expedition which led to the founding of Villa Real (modern Ciudad Real). The king assembled his [71] force which included municipal militias to deal with the rebellious king of Murcia. Alfonso saw Villa Real as a convenient base in La Mancha for operations in upper Andalusia, and settled the new town with residents of Alcaraz. Since Alcaraz already possessed a Cuencan fuero, Villa Real logically received the same body of law.⁽⁴⁾ However, Alfonso does not seem to have been favorably disposed toward the Cuenca pattern, and even attempted to supplant the 1236 version given by Fernando III to Baeza before reversing himself in 1273 by restoring it there.⁽⁵⁾ Beyond this there is no record of his assigning the Cuenca model anywhere, although it reappeared subsequent to his reign.

Rather, Alfonso turned his attention to the model which Fernando III had originated at Córdoba in 1241. Some of this law had its origins in a body of municipal precedents tied to the assorted fueros of Toledo going back to the early twelfth century, a developing system of law which García-Gallo has argued was intended as a royalist alternative to the more liberal pattern of Cuenca-Teruel. This Córdoban charter, as noted earlier, included military law drawn from the earlier Toledan pattern. However, of this group of charters, the first at Córdoba and the last at Carmona were the most extensive, particularly in the added provisions concerning military law. The more extensive Córdoba-Carmona version, apparently created for the Andalusian frontier, did find some favor with Alfonso X, who gave it to the port city of Alicante, which anchored his then Murcian frontier with the Crown of Aragon, in October of 1252. It reappeared in 1271, when Alfonso awarded it to Lorca, the fortress town astride the main road from Granada into Murcia.⁽⁶⁾

What does it tell us of Fernando and Alfonso's municipal policy on the military frontier? First, that the social fluidity of municipal warfare should be retained, inasmuch as peones had the right to acquire the urban aristocratic ranking of caballero with the purchase of the proper horse, arms and land holdings (heredades). The ability to move from the peón to the caballero class through the acquisition of a horse and a willingness to fight on its back had been an ongoing feature of peninsular warfare during the Early Middle Ages, and it is interesting to see the process still potentially at work in the Andalusian and Murcian frontier. However, this must be weighed against the contemporary effort to create an upper aristocracy in the towns, the caballeros delinaje, above the regular caballero class.⁽⁷⁾

Second, some traditional law was drawn into the formula. For example, familiar restrictions were also included against taking arms and horses into Moorish territory, and a notable concern for the protection [72] of the royal and municipal standards during defensive apellidos and cabalgadas (mounted raiding forays). This derives from the high symbolic value placed on royal and town standards which were a natural target in combat on which bounties were often placed. Indeed, the standards, along with the keys to the gates of the town and the town seal were to remain in the possession of the juez (the chief administrative official of the town) who was instructed to be well-armed on such occasions, even including horse mail. All castles won by the municipal militia were to be handed over to the king, although at Carmona and Lorca (both given late in the reigns of their respective monarchs) such castles could be re-awarded to the takers after the death of the ruler.⁽⁸⁾

Third, The Córdoba group of charters reflect the frontier instability that must have been much on the mind of ruler and subject alike when it considered the unhappy possibility that the Muslims might retake the lands wrenched from them. A law thus insured that residents losing heredades to Moorish counter-conquest could expect to have their holdings restored, once the land had been retaken.⁽⁹⁾ The Córdoban bloc dealt with matters regarding the caballero class and its legal standing which had emerged earlier in the Toledan pattern and would be echoed repeatedly in Alfonso's charters. To receive the tax exemptions which went with municipal knightly status, a married caballero was required to reside in the town and specifically in a house in the villa with his wife and children. When a caballero died, his horse and arms, the prime qualifications for his class position in the town as well as his military value to the king, were to pass to his sons (or his parents if he had no male children). His wife was to maintain her caballero rank during her widowhood, and his sons would also receive the benefits of that class until they were old enough to serve in their own right.⁽¹⁰⁾ While much of this derives from the older municipal law, the repeated stress on this maintenance of status and arms indicates Alfonso's continuing concern regarding the combat readiness of his municipal light cavalry.

Moreover, the task left by his father to organize and synthesize the widely-spread territories of his kingdom soon imposed itself upon Alfonso's legal creativity. Doubtless contemplating with his legists the compilation of the vast Romanizations of Castilian law in the Espéculo and the subsequent Siete partidas, the years 1255-56 saw him open a dramatic new initiative in law with the widespread imposition of a unified municipal code. The editors of the nineteenth-century documents collection, the Memorial histórico español, who first identified the relationship of these fueros, referred to the pattern being awarded as the Fuero real, a ambiguous term since Alfonso also promulgated the code known by that name. I will refer to the fueros based on this formulary as the Ordenamientode [73] 1256 charters. García-Gallo has argued that the early unification of law called the Espéculo is present in these charters, but the military content does not by itself bear this thesis out.⁽¹¹⁾ Primarily, we have here some more detailed statements regarding the knightly obligation to retain arms, sweetened by some exemptions to soften the demand.

By 1256, versions of this new pattern were given in a broad stroke to the Meseta towns of Central Castile, including Burgos and Buitrago in the far northeast, Arévalo, Ávila, Cuéllar and Peñafiel north of the Central Sierras, at Atienza east of Madrid, and at Trujillo in Extremadura. An amplification of these laws appeared at Escalona in 1261, at Madrid in 1262, and at Ávila and Cuéllar in 1264. A further and very interesting amplification was given also to Madrid in 1264, discussed below. This Ordenamientode 1256 pattern represented the direction of Alfonso's municipal thinking, which was the unification of the diverse regional traditions of town law that had emerged during the preceding centuries of the Reconquest. For a monarch bent on consolidating the loose-knit institutional state which was the result of two centuries of expansion, these regional diversities were intolerable, particularly given the inequity of the laws from town to town. In addition, there was a problem in attempting to build a system of law with the established fueros such as Cuenca when no single body of tradition, no matter how well written, could easily be applied outside of the area where it had germinated. As a solution to the problem of diversity, Alfonso's prototype encountered mixed results at best. Valladolid received the amplified fuero in 1265, and there were aspects of its military requirements to be found in the fuero received by Murcia after its restoration in 1266 and at Requena in 1268. By this time, however, Alfonso had acquired a significant number of distractions, and there is little indication that he pursued the imposition of the Ordenamientode 1256 format on his towns after 1268. In fact, he even removed this type of charter from Baeza, restoring the older Cuenca-format in 1273.⁽¹²⁾

The fueros of the Ordenamientode 1256 pattern reveal a blend of old and new law. To secure their normal rights, the caballeros had to reside in the town from eight days before Christmas until eight days after the Sunday before Lent, maintaining a house in which their wives and children dwelled in the town during that period.⁽¹³⁾ Requiring residence was not a new concept; specifying the time period was, and had only appeared once before at Alfaiates where duration but not the particular point in the year was indicated.⁽¹⁴⁾

The specification of caballero battle gear, although not new as a concept was more detailed than any which had appeared before. The [74] horse had to have a value of at least thirty maravedis, and the properly equipped mounted warrior required a shield, a lance, a metal helmet, a sword, a mail body jacket (loriga) with a padded jacket beneath (perpunte) along with arm and thigh protectors (brafoneras).⁽¹⁵⁾ The list indicates a familiarity with combat hazards, especially in the required use of the padded jacket beneath the mail coat both to ease the pressure of the metal on the body and to insulate the flesh from the rapid temperature changes of the mail. Just as significant, the length and detail of the list suggests one, that the urban knightly class had been coming to battle in recent decades ill-equipped and ill-prepared to fight, and two, that a reason for such a concern about the battle safety of the caballeros lay in the possibility that there simply weren't enough of them to meet the military pressures and needs that Alfonso envisioned for the remainder of his rule. The Ordenamiento de 1256 charters assured the continuance of knightly status for widows and their sons as well until they matured.⁽¹⁶⁾ This reflects the intensifying efforts on the part of that class to make permanent its social and economic prerogatives. To make service in the royal hueste more attractive, the town was freed of the census tax known as the marzadga in the years that the concejo took its municipal contingent on campaign with the king.⁽¹⁷⁾ The status of cavallerofijodalgo was also granted to men who had the proper horse and arms in Alicante and in Cartagena in 1257, and to archers and ship captains as well, but here that which constituted "proper" equipment was not specified in either grant.⁽¹⁸⁾

In 1261 the town of Escalona west of Madrid received the first in a new group of charters related to the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern. It contained all of the military references typical of the grants of 1255-56, as did the fuero granted to Madrid one year later. There were some interesting changes in emphasis, however. First, the period of residence was extended to the feast day of John the Baptist (June 24), making the caballero total stay in the town approximately a half-year. Second, there was a notable swing toward increasing the exemptions a caballero might claim. In Burgos, Buitrago and Peñafiel caballeros gained tax exempt status for their bread suppliers, millers, gardeners, those who took care of their children and assorted livestock tenders. To this list, Escalona and Madrid added beekeepers and household managers. Then the caballeros were to have a certain amount of random excuses acquired through military service and the provision of equipment, to be given to those whom they chose. Two excuses were gained for service and the provision of equipment, two excuses for service in the royal hueste, three more could be gained for the provision of a field tent, and five could be gained for bringing a [75] horse's mail coat (See Chapter Five for a fuller discussion of the advantages of equipment provision). A supplementary charter to Escalona required that the weapons and equipment should be displayed at the alarde (troop and weapons muster) on the first of each March.⁽¹⁹⁾ This stress upon exemptions is reminiscent of a trend in the twelfth and thirteenth-century Leonese law which now appears to be migrating into Castile.⁽²⁰⁾

In 1264 Ávila, which had already received a version of the royal fuero, was granted a supplementary charter which offered curious additions in caballero obligations regarding military service. The town could now extend the knightly class random tax exemptions to bread suppliers as well as to minor brothers and nephews which were valid until these male relatives were old enough to serve in their own right.⁽²¹⁾ In April, 1264 Alfonso granted a territorial award of the Ordenamiento de1256 pattern to all of the towns of Extremadura, which added the right of justifiably excused caballeros to maintain their class status and thereby to be free of the fonsadera penalty fee for failing to serve in the hueste. The Extremaduran and Abulense grants give no indication of the equipment excuses seen at Escalona and Madrid, but a new element does turn up in both fueros in an extended law discussing the inheritance of the horse and the knight's arms. From the mid-twelfth century onward, both the horse and the arms which rendered the caballero capable of giving military service and of maintaining his status were to be inherited by the eldest son, thus enabling the emergence of a hereditary class.⁽²²⁾

This concern with the municipal vecino and his arms reached its fullest development with a charter given to Madrid in August of 1264, where the persons involved were not referred to as caballeros or as peones, but simply as pecheros (taxpayers). Probably both classes were being dealt with together, since the required weapons list (typical of the Ordenamiento de 1256 listing for caballeros) included the right to substitute a crossbow (ballesta) for the lance and a cuchiello serranil (literally a mountain-dweller's knife) for the sword. Since the lance and sword were quintessential knightly weapons while the crossbow and the long knife were considered weapons of infantrymen, the two groups were almost certainly gathered here under the name of pecheros. To make the crossbow substitution, Alfonso stipulated that the archer be able to pull the bow well. The impartible inheritance of weapons by the eldest son reappears here with the added stipulation that if the eldest son already had the necessary weapons, the deceased's armament should be inherited en bloc by the next eldest son. While this revived interest in the peones was noteworthy, the process by which the citizen's possession [76] of the proper weapons found verification proves even more revealing. No person was to borrow armaments from another for verification, nor become indebted through a pledge to acquire them. Money could not be acceptably substituted for weapons. To assure that all these conditions were being met, the pechero had to bring his required arsenal to the plaza of the town for display biannually (in mid-March and on Michaelmas in late September, a kind of before and after check for the campaign season) so that the weapons might be inspected. At least one other city began such examinations at about this time, for Seville utilized the nearby Campo de Tablada as its inspection site.⁽²³⁾

The thrust of Alfonso's laws in the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern seems undeniable. He evidences concern about the number of available militiamen, especially caballeros, that he could muster from the towns, especially those well back from the Andalusian frontier. Alfonso wants his militias properly armed for their own preservation and for their military effectiveness. He had reached the point of insisting that the town residents possessed the weapons required of them, and deemed it necessary that the required weapons be kept together from generation to generation. The towns which received the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern are in most cases the old Castilian standbys of the Duero and Tajo river valleys which had a strong record of providing militias that had served El Sabio's predecessors.

One conclusion is evident: based on his expectations derived from former municipal capabilities, the king believes his towns are in the early stages of atrophy in their military capability. One can only conjecture the source of the king's concern which prompted the military preparedness regulations inserted into the April, 1264 fueros, whether the backlash of the abortive campaign against Salé in North Africa in 1260 or the pressures exerted during the conquest of Niebla in 1262. The municipal militias had indeed joined Alfonso at Niebla. The concejo musters also accompanied the king on an expedition against Granada in 1263. No indication of poor performance by the towns in any of these military endeavors appears in the royal chronicle.⁽²⁴⁾ But the new weapons inspection required at Madrid in August had a much more direct cause: Nasrid instigation of major Muslim revolts in Andalusia and Murcia in June of 1264. This event generated the threat of a major destabilization of the southern frontier. For a brief time Alfonso must have thought himself back in the days of his great-uncle with a new Alarcos or Las Navas in prospect. In many respects, he had reached the great turning point of his reign.

[77]

The Andalusian and Murcian revolts were turned back with a fortuitously small loss of towns and castles between 1264 and 1266. Credit for averting a far worse military disaster has traditionally and deservedly been awarded to the vital assistance given by King Jaime, and to the military orders with their vast holdings in the area. It should also be mentioned that Alfonso X noted in his own documents the contributions of the concejo of Orihuela and the caballeros of Cáceres and Seville, the Cácerans having especially been singled out for joining a successful expedition of the Infante Fernando against Granada during the revolt.⁽²⁵⁾ While independent municipalities in the newly-conquered realms in the south were few, the ones that were there played a role in stabilizing the situation. The trust placed in Lorca as revealed by its contemporary documents gives us one example of such a town. However, the real impact of the Murcian revolts upon Alfonso's policy of municipal military preparedness did not lie in the exchange of some frontier territories in the south. The energies burnt up in resolving the Muslim crisis, combined with the distraction of the pursuit of the imperial title and the financial maneuvering entailed by that project, seem to drain away Alfonso's enthusiasm for a unified municipal law and its attendant integration of a more effective military structure. At the least, these seem to offer the most plausible explanation for what happened to the Ordenamiento de1256 program in Alfonso's later years.

Valladolid did receive a fuero in this pattern in August of 1265 in which one finds a regulation for the caballero's horse and arms as well as other military status laws which derive from the original 1255-56 charters and their later amplifications. However, Valladolid's charter lacked a specific time period for town residence, a impartible law of weapons inheritance, and reference to the weapons inspection required a year earlier in Madrid.⁽²⁶⁾ This is the first suggestion of a drift toward a lack of specificity and it stands in contrast to the pre-1265 policies. Another important opportunity was passed by when Alfonso settled Murcia in May of 1266 and granted the former Muslim vassal city a royal charter. The outline of the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern was there, with its requirement of a town house inhabited by the caballero's or peón's family and stipulation that the same two classes have appropriate weapons, but again no time frame was noted and now the mandated weapons were not listed. Alfonso sought the implantation of municipal concejos in the reconquered areas of the Murcian kingdom, and at Elche he granted a similarly unspecified set of requirements to the knights and infantrymen in 1267.⁽²⁷⁾[78] By 1268, all of Requena's residents received town residence exemptions if they performed fortification maintenance on the town walls and regional fortifications, and caballeros with an inhabited house (again without a cited time period) did not need to perform even that chore. The royal chronicle cited a tax for the caballeros fijosdalgos of Burgos in response to their failures in wall maintenance. Escalona received a supplement to its charters in 1269 which seemed a step backward from its earlier Ordenamiento de 1256 regulations of 1261. The length of residence requirements and the weapons list were omitted, although possibly the former specifications were still assumed.⁽²⁸⁾

After this point, the fueros and their content thin out considerably. The towns were gaining leverage through the king's determination to pursue the German imperial crown, and his need to make concessions in order to obtain the tax resources to fund that endeavor. This is indicated by the set of laws which appear in 1273 just prior to Alfonso's departure to meet with Gregory X in hope of achieving his goal. Alfonso balanced the fiscal exactions wrested from the Cortes with concessions granted in the military and legal sectors. The caballeros of Cáceres were to receive their tax exemptions without having the appropriate horse and arms in exchange for their past service against Granada. The caballeros of Seville and Córdoba (in 1273 and 1280, respectively) received the very considerable exemption from the royal monedaforera tax for simply retaining their horses and arms in the city. Also, it was at this point that Baeza had its Cuenca-model fuero restored.⁽²⁹⁾ While this restored fuero for Baeza had the very ample body of militia laws contained within the Cuenca formulary, it nonetheless represented a defeat for Alfonso since it probably replaced an Ordenamiento de 1256 model he had imposed earlier and recorded instead of another victory of territorial over national law. The last suggestion of any residual determination on the part of the king to pursue the former policy could be seen at Aguilar de Campo in 1276, where any money gained through military service by the caballeros had to be returned if the knight had served without proper equipment, and paid in double amount if he resisted the penalty. Those who failed to show up for the troop and weapons muster (alarde) properly equipped received similar penalties.⁽³⁰⁾

There were, nonetheless, continuing indications of militia service on the frontier in the 1270's. The "concejos de las Extremaduras" were mustered for an expedition to Granada in 1271. When King Alfonso requested that the municipal concejos serve with Prince Fernando in 1273, many of them informed the prince that they had already rendered their [79] required expeditionary commitment for that period. In that same year, Alfonso gathered a force to accompany him for a meeting with King Jaime of Aragon at Cuenca, and called up some unspecified militia contingents to enhance the size of his entourage. 1275-76 saw another major Muslim uprising in the south instigated by Granada, and again the urban militias appeared at the scene. The concejos of Toledo, Talavera, Guadalajara and Madrid, militias well blooded in the annals of frontier warfare, rallied to the aid of Archbishop Sancho of Toledo (the son of King Jaime of Aragon) at Jaén, where this force suffered severe losses and the death of its archiepiscopal commander. Prince Fernando moved promptly to the frontier, summoning a new levy of the town militias to join his expedition at Villa Real. When the heir apparent died there suddenly in 1275, his brother Prince Sancho arrived at the city to take up command of the force, which now included militias from all over Castile. The expedition quelled the revolts in Andalusia, made its way to Córdoba to regroup, returning then to Toledo where King Alfonso met the victorious Sancho and his army. The militias of Uceda, Guadalajara, Hita, Atienza, Medinaceli and Hariza were rousted in the unsuccessful attempt of Alfonso X to prevent his queen, daughter-in-law and the late Prince Fernando's children from fleeing to Aragon. A general muster of the municipal militias served in the royal siege of Algeciras during 1277-78, and again in 1280 in a campaign force King Alfonso gathered at Córdoba to assault Granada. When Alfonso became ill, Prince Sancho again took command and led what became a costly and casualty-ridden campaign into the south. In 1279, the Burgos militia served with the prince in a small expedition which squelched a rebellion of some nobles in the Cuenca region.⁽³¹⁾

Within and without the kingdom, then, townsmen were performing a variety of military tasks in a troubled decade. By the end of his reign, however, Alfonso's endeavors on all fronts were in the process of disintegration in the face of the aristocratic revolts in behalf of his son Prince Sancho. The king was soon forced to call on Islamic support in trying to put down the incipient insurrection in his reinos, a step which certainly obviated any further development in a unified military policy for his towns. The Siete partidas offered some indications of his program in its ample sections on military law, but the lack of an opportunity to promulgate the code left all of this in the realm of theory. The towns were already going their own way.

With the decline of a centralizing initiative from the king after 1265, the independent municipal activity typical of the earlier Reconquest reappeared, [80] indeed even with a certain amount of royal encouragement. While the towns of the Meseta pressed to lighten their military obligations and solidify the aristocratic urban class which developed during the frontier wars, the municipalities on the new frontier represented what was left of the municipal forces at the ready to undertake combat burdens and enjoy its profits. Lorca, especially, was able to consolidate its position during and after the Muslim revolts. The town concejo acquired the castles of Puentes and Felí and secured an exemption from the one-fifth royal booty tax in 1265 during the height of the Murcian revolt, received the Córdoba pattern fuero of 1271 with its right, on the death of the monarch, to re-occupy any castles given to Alfonso at the time of their capture. Lorca also acquired the castle of Cella from the king in 1277.⁽³²⁾ Once Murcia was taken, it too began to develop a substantial base for independent action, receiving its rather inspecific Ordenamiento de1256 model charter in 1266. In 1267 Murcia gained the right to control the roads in its vicinity and to have the villages of Mula and Molina Seca serve in the hueste under its standard.⁽³³⁾ Allowing such towns to gain this measure of autonomy certainly made them more independent militarily but it augured badly for the future of royal control in the area. Once Arcos de la Frontera was restored to Christian control in 1268, the town was allowed to limit its hueste service south of the Guadalquivir River, a problem when Alfonso required their assistance in the central kingdom.⁽³⁴⁾

Meanwhile, the towns responded collectively to the growing disorders in the realm. The Andalusian cities of Córdoba, Jaén, Baeza, Úbeda, Andújar, San Esteban, Iznatoraf, Quesada and Cazorla formed a hermandad (brotherhood) for mutual defense against the Muslims in 1265, including efforts to settle local internal disputes. There were some harsh fines for those who provoked disorder, wished to pass through their respective territories illegally, or refused to cooperate in joint military endeavors. This kind of joint alliance reappeared among the same Andalusian frontier towns in 1282, when the towns prepared to defend themselves against either Alfonso or his rebellious son Sancho. In all likelihood it was the militias of the Andalusian hermandad, including that of Córdoba under its commander Fernán Muñiz, which sparred at this time with an army led by the renegade noble Fernán Pérez Ponce, resulting in heavy municipal casualties and the death of the Córdoban commander. The municipalities of Castile, Leon, Galicia, Extremadura and Andalusia joined members of the clergy and nobility in a hermandad supporting Prince Sancho in 1282 at Valladolid. 1282 also saw a hermandad [81] formed between Salamanca and Cuenca, and by 1284 a group of inter-regional hermandades involving the concejos of Castile, Leon, Galicia, Extremadura, Toledo and Andalusia appeared.⁽³⁵⁾ These were not the first such brotherhoods or signs of municipal turbulence among the frontier towns in the Castilian Reconquest and they were not destined to be the last. Alfonso's failure had meant the revisitation of the past upon himself and his successors.
 
 

In the Crown of Aragon, King Jaime I (Jaume I) had arrived at a crossroads in the use of municipal institutions, as well. Once Murcia had become tributary to Castile and it was mutually agreed that this Muslim principality belonged within the Castilian future sphere of conquest, Jaime's future peninsular expansion seemed closed. The southern areas of the Valencian Regne still required absorption and stabilization and the need for military resources clearly remained, given that Jaime still looked out upon potentially threatening neighbors, including Muslims, the French and even Castile. Within his realm an occasionally rebellious nobility led him to threaten his aristocrats with the use of the municipal militias against them at Zaragoza in 1264, and subsequently to advise Alfonso X to keep the towns and the church allied with the crown since combined municipal and ecclesiastical power was sufficient to defeat the nobility⁽³⁶⁾ He would still find a use for urban militias, as the last decades of his reign give ample evidence. The Cordilleran militias and the rich legal tradition that is our best evidence of their operation had rendered excellent service in the Valencian conquest. The fueros of Teruel and Albarracín even gave early evidence of the tax exemption for residing in the town and maintaining a horse and equipment, a requirement which loomed so large in the Castilian Toledan tradition, interesting in that these laws appear in sections of the Teruel-Albarracín charters that are not paralleled in the Cuencan versions on the other side of the Cordillera.⁽³⁷⁾

As the Teruel branch of the Teruel-Cuenca family of charters ceased its expansion beyond Albarracín, the most elaborate statements of military law continued, nonetheless, to be assigned to the upland towns, starting with the consolidation of the Consuetudines of Lleida in 1228, a city on the frontier between the Aragonese Reino and the Catalan principality of Barcelona. The statutes of Lleida limited full residential privileges to persons who had a horse, maintained their wives and families in the city, and served in the royal exercitus (another word for host service).⁽³⁸⁾ Once we reach the [82] post-Valencian conquest era in Jaime's reign, the surviving extended statements of military law in the period concentrate on three well-established militia towns: Daroca, Zaragoza and Jaca. Daroca was reminded of the fines to be paid by knights and infantry for missing the defensive assembly known as apellido in 1256, and had its militia requirement of militia service restated in 1270. Zaragoza was freed of mustering its militia or providing provisions for Jaime's campaign against the Catalan revolts, but was obligated to provide support for the king's wars to put down the Murcian uprisings, although assured that the exactions were temporary. Jaca had its obligations to serve in the royal exercitus and the mounted raiding force (caualcatis) reiterated in 1249 and 1269.⁽³⁹⁾

Maintaining the tradition of upland Aragonese and Cordilleran military activism would not be easy once Aragon had conceded the occupation of Murcia to Castile and honored that commitment by breaking the back of the Murcian resistance in 1265-66, while returning the bulk of the conquests to Castile. As the Catalans increased their resettlement activity in the Kingdom of Valencia and even penetrated marginally into Murcia, the southern edge of potential Cordilleran expansion was closed off, ending the two-century role these frontier towns had played in the Aragonese Reconquest. While we cannot be certain of the causes, either the Aragonese towns had no excess population available to claim the substantial barrios and households in Valencia awarded to them by Jaime in the Repartimiento of that city, or the townsmen of the Cordillera simply did not want to come. Zaragoza and Tarazona managed to utilize only about forty percent of the households allotted to them, Daroca under thirty-five percent and Calatayud less than twenty. Teruel was the only town, Catalan or Aragonese, to attain fifty-five percent residency, while a small district bordering between the allotments of Teruel and Daroca reached only two percent. The figures improve only slightly when adjusted to account for settlement by these townsmen in parts of the city not originally allotted to them. In truth, the Catalan rates were no better, but the Catalans continued to be available for settlement in some numbers south of Valencia city and into Murcia, a capability apparently not equaled by the Aragonese townsmen.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Time and circumstances dictated that the Aragonese militias drifted increasingly into the position of a reserve force without an active part in combat or settlement.

There are indications that Jaime and the other individuals in the Crown of Aragon capable of calling forth military contingents did attempt something of a militarization of the Catalan municipalities. Gual Camarena's study of patterns of municipal codes in the Kingdom of Valencia and the possible movement of upland traditions such as those of Lleida, Zaragoza and the Fuero de Aragón on to the coastal plain includes few towns with military service obligations, so that his data and mine fail to mesh effectively.⁽⁴¹⁾ I base my own assumptions [83] of an attempt to increase the number of military effectives living in the towns and villages upon a moderately increasing number of citations of military obligations imposed in the charters of the Catalan and Valencian municipalities during Jaime's reign. While only fifteen such references appear in the 236 documents gathered by Font Ríus prior to the Conqueror's reign, the 91 documents in the same collection dated during Jaime's period show 22 such references, fifteen of which require service and seven of which give exemption from such service. The other documentary source collections corroborate this mild increase, suggesting that Jaime was pressing all possible resources to sustain his program for southern conquest.

Unlike the extended descriptions of military service and its regulations which typify the Cordilleran tradition and culminate at Teruel, the coastal towns and villages rarely incur more than a simple obligation to give the royal expeditionary service of host or exercitus and the mounted raiding contingents for the cavalcata, or exemption from these same services. Before 1250, eighteen of these sites required such services and nine were given exemption from them.⁽⁴²⁾ After 1251, there was a dramatic shift in favor of exemption from service, with two places required to serve, two with a requirement which they were permitted to buy off, and nine given exemptions from such services.⁽⁴³⁾ The closing of the Crown of Aragon's southern frontier with the ceding of Murcia to Castile might well explain this tendency, although complacency was to prove ill-justified. There remained periodic internal revolts and disturbances to quell, the Murcian uprising with which to contend, and threats of further large-scale rebellions by the Muslims supported by North Africa such as that which darkened Jaime's last years. These crises generated emergency efforts by Jaime to draw upon the older resources, resulting in an ambiguous policy regarding the pacification of his kingdom and the defusing of the military potential of his municipalities.

The first event to impose this dilemma on Jaime was the uprising in the kingdom of Murcia. The revolt which had such a dramatic impact on Alfonso X in Castile found Jaime in a cooperative frame of mind to assist his kindred monarch. During the assault on Murcia, Jaime again exacted support and retinues from his municipal constituents, especially the Huescan upland towns of Tamarit and Monzón noted in the king's Crònica. The royal forces experienced considerable difficulties in keeping some of their locally recruited warriors together for such an extended campaign, marking a rather decided contrast to the voluntarism so in evidence during the assault on Valencia, and this despite the considerable booty being acquired which enriched various members of the victorious host.⁽⁴⁴⁾ There was yet another sign of slippage from the upland towns in 1274, when Jaime was gathering his forces to subdue [84] the revolts of a number of Catalan nobles, and called upon that pillar of the Valencian assault, the concejo of Zaragoza, to send a contingent with three months supplies to round out his expeditionary force. This request was dated on July 15, and the response must have been disappointing. On July 23 Jaime resubmitted his request, offering to permit the Zaragozans to pay a fee of three thousand Jacan solidos in lieu of service. Jaime was back on September 8 to demand the fee, as the citizens of Zaragoza had rendered neither its militia nor the required money.⁽⁴⁵⁾

Far more impressive for assessing the impact of the Arago-Catalan municipal capability are the massive musterings of Catalan towns in 1275: first some twenty-five towns for three-month service on March 29; then twenty-seven for the same term on April 8; finally twenty-five for a two-month term on June 13.⁽⁴⁶⁾ When a new and major uprising of the Muslims emerged in 1276, the terminally-ill Jaime ordered some seventy-three Catalan towns to remain apart from the conflict of the Count of Ampurias and Jaime's son Prince Pere on April 21, possibly to maintain readiness for duty in Valencia. He specifically summoned Aragonese Daroca to assemble its militia with two months worth of supplies and march to Teruel joining a larger force assembling to deal with these Valencian revolts.⁽⁴⁷⁾ The revolt was ultimately quelled by Pedro III (Pere II), to whom the peninsular Aragonese and Catalan Reinos had now passed.

The larger towns on the Catalan coast, especially Barcelona and Valencia, displayed a growing capability to render military service especially on those occasions when the realm was attacked, as indicated in the twelfth century by the "Princeps namque" section of the Usatges of Catalonia. Barcelona assembled its host (called the Sagramental) at Jaime's order in 1257, a muster of the town and neighboring regions which included archers and soldiers providing their own lances and swords.⁽⁴⁸⁾ While the Furs of Valencia provided little in the way of military information, Jaime grants of tax exemptions to those who maintained a horse and arms in the city, a concession renewed by his son Pedro III, suggests a continuing interest in municipal light cavalry. Jaime also expected the citizens of Valencia to maintain its walls in good defensive order. In the same year that Barcelona's Sagramental was mustered (1257), the governor of Valencia under royal command brought a military force from the region to join the royal army at Almudébar north of Zaragoza. Apparently any slack that developed among the Aragonese upland [85] towns was being taken up by the Catalan towns and the Valencian levies, as the work of Robert Burns indicates.⁽⁴⁹⁾
 
 

Navarre's contribution to municipal military evolution had become moribund by the middle of the thirteenth century. Navarrese raiding continued to be a consideration on the Aragonese frontier, borne out by the promise of military service from the town of Sábada to Jaime I in exchange for royal assistance against "enemigos nuestros que sean de frontera de Navarra," but how much of this concern was directed toward the activity of Navarrese municipal militias is dubious.⁽⁵⁰⁾ With the death of Sancho VII in 1234 and the failure of either Aragon or Castile to absorb the kingdom, Navarre passed into the control of the Champagne dynasty of Thibault I (1234-53) and Thibault II (1253-70). Its Muslim frontier had for some time been blocked by the expansion of Castile and Aragon, and the new dynasty would be more interested in crusading outside the Peninsula than within. The handful of charters which deal with any kind of municipal military requirement dating from the reigns of the two Thibaults show the retention of hueste and cabalgada at Urroz and Tajonar, and the exemption from these services at Garitoain and Gallipienzo. Torralba and Viana near the Castilian frontier received exemption from the fonsadera military tax, the latter because of the devastation wrought by Prince Fernando's Castilian raiding forays on the Navarrese frontier in 1274-75.⁽⁵¹⁾ Cut off from the stresses which expanded the reach of the municipal forces based in Castile, Aragon and Portugal, we can assume that the municipalities of Navarre had retained only the capability for purely short-range operations by the mid-thirteenth century. The Reconquest had long since ceased to work its influence on their development.

By the age of Afonso III (1248-1279) Portugal had completed its basic frontiers. As with the preceding Portuguese reign, there are no chronicle references relating militia activity. The major endeavor, conquest of the western Algarve, was completed early in Afonso's rule, leaving him to consider only those military needs required to pursue the rights of the crown in internal affairs and to shore up his frontiers against Castile. A great deal of municipal legislation appears in the reign, both in a rich number of surviving forais and in the newer collections of municipal costumes with their fuller statement of municipal law. The towns even send their first formal representation to the royal council in the Cortes of Leiria in [86] 1254. Despite all of this surviving material with its considerable growth of municipal precedents, virtually no new military material emerges.

There was the continued awarding of forais in the established Évora, Trancoso and Santarém families as well as the expansion of a new regional group in the north, and from the geographic pattern of their distribution and the identity of their grantors it is possible to establish the basic thrust of Afonso's municipal military policy. While the king would not completely avoid the conflict with the church that had created such difficulties for his father and brother, the real breach came very late in his reign. Thus the flow of his municipal law remains relatively constant, enabling one to analyze the role played by the conclusion of the Portuguese Reconquest upon his policies.

Noteworthy changes appear in the distribution of the older families of charters: for example, a substantial shift of the Évora group into the hands of non-royal grantors, primarily the military orders; the increasing use of royal grants of the Santarém format for towns in the central and eastern Alentejo, a zone formerly dominated by the Évora pattern; and the issuing of the Trancoso format in the north of Portugal, far outside its older geographic concentration in the Beira Alta. A newer family, developing from the precedents established at Cidadêlhe in 1224 and Alijó in 1226, multiplied in grants from Afonso III between 1254 and 1257 in the same general area where the initial charters were given. The Cidadêlhe group sought short-ranged regional obligations limited in frequency to once a year and in geography to the Douro-Lima-Minho river valleys. Moreover, Setúbal (1249) presents the first reference to an exercitus or caualgada at sea, almost exactly contemporary to a similar reference on the opposite side of the Peninsula at Cartagena in 1246.⁽⁵²⁾ Both the Portuguese and Castilian frontiers were now close enough to the North African coast to consider the possibility of offensive and defensive marine action.

The overall intent of Afonso's strategy pointed toward an outer ring of Trancoso-type militias with their one-third cavalry muster in the north and east, backed by a defense in depth based on the Cidadêlhe militias of the Douro, Lima and Minho. To the east and southeast, the Évora system spread, offering its greater participation of the municipal cavalieros (two-thirds). This region received additional reinforcement from the knightly levies of the towns granted the Santarém forais, buffering the region against any danger of Castilian expansion from Seville or Niebla. In the southern Alentejo and the Algarve, urban settlement was [87] thinner, and a deep defense was unlikely, save by the military orders who controlled much of this land. Numerous other forais outside these family patterns existed, but they offer only scattered brief references to military requirements thus giving few insights into any royal system of militia usage.

The emergence of lengthy municipal customs collections occurred in Portugal at this time, as in Catalonia. While similar in the diversity of their law to the earlier Cuenca-Teruel and Coria Cima-Coa collections, there is little military law in these Portuguese or Catalan compilations. The most interesting laws in this group appeared at Alcácer, where weapons requirements, although little detailed, bear some comparison to the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern in Castile.⁽⁵³⁾ These collections of customs speak much more to legal diversification, Roman legal influences and the rise of commercial activity (especially in Catalonia) than they do to a sophisticated military establishment. Moreover, they suggest a variety of interests in general not found in the contemporary Castilian municipality, one possible effect of the continuing existence of an active Muslim frontier.
 
 

Thus, for three of the four Christian kingdoms the Reconquest had in effect terminated. By 1284, the era of common purpose against the shared Muslim foe, although honored as often in the breach as in the fulfillment, drew to a close. The age of continued territorial aggrandizement among Christian neighbors without a significant Islamic distraction had begun for all but Castile, the only kingdom facing Granada and the other three Christian states. The municipalities of the Peninsula offer penetrating insights into the impact of these later thirteenth-century forces on the major kingdoms and their attempts to cope with the readjusted realities. In Portugal, the first priority with regard to the municipal militias became defense against Castile. The need for large expeditionary forces to capture and occupy territory was now largely a thing of the past. The growth of the established foral families came to an end, left in the developmental stage that Afonso I had established at the beginning of the Portuguese Reconquest; thus the towns maintained basically a defensive capability with a limited capacity for offensive expeditionary service. Their relationship to the crown gave the king the strongest foothold he possessed in the Alentejo and the Algarve, but he would not have wanted their military establishment enhanced beyond its thirteenth-century level, [88] since armed towns defending their rights present a serious obstacle to the royal consolidation of the realm. The Kingdom of Navarre presents a model quite similar to that of Portugal with municipal militias yet less developed and more tied to defensive operations.

The Crown of Aragon in the age of Jaime I and Pedro III presents a more complex picture than is true for Portugal and Navarre. King Jaime had effectively managed the capabilities of his varied municipal military resources during his long rule, adjusting adroitly to the succession of dramatic changes wrought by his successful campaigns. He was able to exploit his militias when he needed them for the conquests that gave him his formidable reputation. His emphasis shifted from extension to exemption once Valencia and its surroundings had been conquered, possibly because he considered unwise the continued encouragement of a widespread municipal military capability in a realm which had found its appropriate frontiers. Thereafter, such towns could constitute a threat to royal authority as they were to prove in Castile. Notwithstanding these considerations, the king-count intended that the larger Catalan towns maintain forces available for military service. The record clearly indicates this for Barcelona and Valencia, and the large allotment of households in the division of Valencia to the citizens of towns like Barcelona, Tortosa, Tarragona, Montblanch, Lleida and even Montpellier suggest that they all contributed militias to the Valencian siege, unless Jaime merely assumed them to possess the best potential pools of populators. The large muster of Catalan militias in 1275-76 indicate a continuation of this capability. On the other hand, during the brief period that Jaime controlled large portions of Murcia after the revolts there, he chose the route of aristocratically controlled señoríos as the vehicles for the settlement pattern rather than the use of municipal concejos (the device Alfonso el Sabio employed in Murcia) to achieve the same end.⁽⁵⁴⁾ Given the ready use of small town settlements by Jaime in the Balearics and in Valencia, the change in policy for Murcia is interesting. It is possible that the uncertain situation he had in Murcia precluded the use of permanent colonists from northern towns there. Since aristocratic señoríos employed as a settlement device in the Cordillera by his predecessors had proved workable in the twelfth century, Jaime may have simply been repeating that policy in Murcia. In each case, the creation of a buffer zone against Castile could be achieved despite a limited supply of municipal colonists. Jaime prudently backed away from the strong temptation of exploiting the Murcian revolts to reopen his frontier with Granada, thus avoiding a share of Castile's future problems. Moreover, the slackening caused by the atrophy of the [89] Cordilleran municipal military contribution and the swing to an emphasis on exemption in exchange for money in the newer Catalan grants does not seem to have harmed the military posture of Aragon and Catalonia. Jaime's musters of 1275-76 suggest a continuing and widespread municipal capability. Pedro III was able to enlist municipal support from Valencia and the other towns of the Regne for the successful siege of Montesa in 1277, while summoning his own vast musters involving some 250 towns to deal with the French invasion of 1285. The Muslim subjects offered their own contribution to the defense to the Crown of Aragon during that French invasion which closed King Pedro's reign.⁽⁵⁵⁾ For those such as the almogàvers who found unbearable the loss of military opportunities resulting from the end of the Aragonese Reconquest, the crown soon provided a newer theater of action across the Mediterranean.

Alfonso X bequeathed a less defined and rather more disappointing legacy to Castile. Castile's frontier situation was extremely complex and dangerously open. While the physical size of the kingdom and its greater population made it the ostensibly dominant peninsular monarchy, this situation was more apparent than real. Great numbers of unassimilated Muslims in Andalusia and Murcia both possessed and had actualized a serious potential for revolt. The newly-conquered areas in New Castile and Andalusia, as was the case in Portugal, had been handed over primarily to the military orders north of the Sierra Morena and the powerful nobility in the Andalusian south, leaving such frontier towns as there were in isolated pockets, cut off from their brethren on the Meseta. The devastation associated with the conquest of Andalusia combined with great numbers of resident natives with their propensity to revolt caused general settlement to follow very slowly after conquest. Some settlers who had acquired land shares in and around Seville returned north within a few years, and the military orders favored large-scale stockraising over the implantation of new municipalities.⁽⁵⁶⁾ Thus the growth of frontier settlement and military preparedness in the towns had been disrupted. The northern towns of Castile were increasingly concerned with using their military experience to defend their prerogatives individually and in collective hermandades, a development which worked against the development of effective royal power. Alfonso's efforts to universalize the military requirements through the Toledan Ordenamientode 1256 models and the military laws of the Espéculo and the Siete partidas were frustrated and delayed by the resistance of his subjects, the Murcian outbreaks and the distractions of his later [90] reign. El Sabio had not only attempted to meet but exceed the deathbed assessment of greater kingship offered by his father. The outcome was an insoluble array of problems and challenges which the king could not fully grasp, to say nothing of resolve. His municipal militias, with their highly developed military capabilities, remained ineffectively restrained by royal policy. Yet their former access to the south, its combat and its opportunities for booty had become difficult, leaving their capacity for warfare unvented in the traditional fashion. Alfonso might not have been able to avert this with the application of the most enlightened insights of the age, but there is no indications that he foresaw the problem at all or took even minimal steps to deal with it. As a result, the municipal energies turned themselves inward, adding immeasurably to the turbulence the later medieval Castilian monarchy would experience.

Having surveyed the origins and development of municipal militias during the Central Middle Ages in Iberia, it is now important to comprehend how that evolution affected the life, the municipal institutions, the economy and the law of the various kinds of towns to be found in Iberia. In turn, the townsmen's municipal organization, their delimiting of their military obligations, their conduct on campaign, the social and economic implications of their warfare, and the influence of this militarized life style on their sense of justice will be considered and assessed. In this way one can come to a fuller understanding of the weight of these three centuries of frontier experience on their daily activities, their institutions and their expectations.

1.  PCG, 2:772-73.

2.  The most important biography of Alfonso X is Ballesteros y Beretta, Alfonso X el Sabio, 54-86. Good brief modern assessments in English are available in Lomax,The Reconquest of Spain, 160-64, and Bishko, "Spanish and Portuguese Reconquest," 3:433-35. For a more lengthy analysis, see O'Callaghan, A History of Medieval Spain, 356-81. Some of the material in this chapter has appeared in an earlier version in Powers, "Warrior-Kings and Militias," 95-129.

3.  For the most recent review of this complex and somewhat obscure process, see García-Gallo, "Nuevas observaciones," 46:609-70. Regarding the possible Alfonsine origins of the Fuero sobre el fecho de las cabalgadas, a curious collection of military customs preserved in a fifteenth-century manuscript, see Powers, "Origins and Development of Municipal Military Service," 26:106-08. The Espéculo was promulgated in the spring of 1255, and was the law until the Cortes of 1272 required the king to back away from this code as the enforced law of the land. The Fuero real, probably granted to the towns with their new municipal laws, was also modified but not abandoned in 1272.

4. Excmo Ayuntamiento de Ciudad Real, La fundación de Villa-Real, 7-14. Torres Fontes, ed.,Colección de documentos del Reino de Murcia, 3:83-85. González, Reinado y diplomas de Fernando III, 1:413. "Crónica del Rey Don Alfonso Décimo," 66:9. The chronicle is notoriously poor in its chronology, and dates this event in 1262. The founding of Villa Real is well established in other sources as occurring in 1255.

5.  FBa, 20-25.

6.  "Fuero de Alicante," 41-48. "Fuero de Lorca, 1271," 76-85. Charters similar to it were given to Mula, Cartagena and Carmona in Fernando III's lifetime. García-Gallo also notes that certain other towns in the Alfonsine period received the fuero of Córdoba, namely Arcos de la Frontera in 1256, Niebla in 1263, Orihuela in 1265 and Murcia in 1266. However, in these instances abbreviated texts survive which offer no basis for comparison of individual laws such as those military laws which appear in Córdoba, Carmona, Alicante and Lorca. Further, Ballesteros, Alfonso X, 1095, indicates that Jódar also received the Lorca charter, but an examination of that document, existing in a eighteenth-copy, reveals only an acknowledgment of the grant with no indications as to the content. see Privilegio confirmando los de sus predecesores hasta Alfonso X, sobre libertades y franquicias de la villa de Jódar, Libro 1157-B, MSS 969, ff. 6r-8v. Alfonso had consistently shown an interest in organizing frontier policy, demonstrated by his creation of a new official in charge of general military responsibility for the Granadan frontier, the Adelantado Mayor in 1253. Pérez-Bustamante, El gobierno y la administración, 1:170-72.

7.  FCórdoba Lat, 3:221. "Fuero de Carmona, (8 May 1252)," 4. FAlicante, 43. FLorca, 78. The effort to develop the caballero delinaje group intensified in the reign of Fernando III and continued into the reign of Alfonso X. Maximums were set on their number in several towns: Seville, 200; Lebrija, 16; Jérez, 40; Arcos,30; Baeza, 33; Úbeda, 32; Requena, 30. See, González, Fernando III, 1:407.

8.  FCórdoba Lat, 3:223. FCórdoba Rom, 3:213. FCarmona, 6-7. FAlicante, 44, 46. FLorca, 80-82.

9.  FCórdoba Lat, 3:221. FCarmona, 5. FAlicante, 43. FLorca, 79.

10.  FCórdoba Lat, 3:221. FCarmona, 4, 6. FAlicante, 42-44. FLorca, 76, 78.

11.  MHE, 1:89-90, 93-94, 97-98, 178-80. García-Gallo, "Nuevas observaciones," 46:620-29. Fuero real del don Alonso el Sabio, 4:19:1-5. An early version of this code was translated into Portuguese in the thirteenth century, and now represents the oldest surviving version: Fuero real de Afonso X, o Sábio: Versão portuguesa, 156-57. "El Espéculo o espejo de todos los derechos," 1:81-126. The only specific military item in the Especulo relating to towns was a concern for the protection of municipal standards and emblems in combat, already signaled in the Córdoba, Carmona and Alicante charters. My own view is that the Especulo draws much of the general ordering of its military law from municipal charters, especially Cuenca, rather than the other way around. The reference to the Libro del fuero mentioned in the 1256 charters is more likely the Fuero real, probably emphasizing that it had been given to the towns in the previous year when the Espéculo was published.

12.  Beyond this remarkable attempt in the Ordenamiento de 1256 pattern to find some kind of universal formula for municipal law, the period from 1256 to 1261 was marked only by a handful of royal fueros which offered some military service exemptions here and additional requirements there, all of which represented a scattered application of older municipal law which gave little hint of this major program on which Alfonso had embarked. Not until the 1261-65 period do we see the outlines of a renewed effort in this direction with the approaching shadow of the Murcian revolts. El fuero de Brihuega, 122, 160, 173, 188. "Alfonso X concede tierras y exenciones en Requena," 167. "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, dando a la ciudad de Córdoba, 5 febrero 1258," 1:127-28. "Fuero de Orense, 1 febrero 1259," 24-26. Gómez de la Torre, Corografía de la provincia de Toro, 105. "Alfonso X confirma el privilegio de Alfonso VIII, expedido en Ayllón," 40-42.

13.  "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, concediendo a la ciudad de Burgos," 1:97-98. "Fuero de los escusados o franquicias de Arévalo, 1256," 1:266. "Fuero de Ávila de 30 de Octubre de 1256," 1:491. "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, concediendo al concejo de Buitrago el fuero real, 1256," 1:93-94. "Alfonso X el Sabio confirma los fueros extensos de Cuéllar," 43. "Privilegio de Rey D. Alfonso X, concediendo a la villa de Peñafiel, 1256," 1:89-90. Fuero de Trujillo, MSS 430, f. 50r. "El fuero de Atienza," 68:267. The term cinquesma as the determinant for the closing period of residence is open to an alternative interpretation, namely being fifty-eight days after the pre-Christmas date. However, given the frequent use of holy days as legal dates and the use of one to set the beginning of the period, I believe the Sunday before Lent is the more likely meaning.

14.  "Fuero de Ledesma," 236. FCO, 30. FCB, 32. FA, 21. FCM, 47. FCR,1:27. FCA, 31. FU, 32. Alfaiates sought residence for "two partsof the year." García-Gallo, "Los fueros de Toledo," 45:346-401.

15.  FBurgos, 1:97-98. FArévalo, 1:266. FÁvila 1256, 1:491. FBuitrago, 1:93-94. FCuéllar, 43. FPeñafiel,1:89-90. FTrujillo, f. 50r. FAtienza, 68:267. Ávila permits a horse of twenty meravedis or more to be utilized. Buitrago does not include a sword or a loriga, but substitutes a peto (chest strap for a horse) and an adarga (another type of shield). A second shield and a piece of horse harness seem illogical here when repeated nowhere else, causing one to suspect a copist's error.

16.  FBurgos, 1:98. FArévalo, 1:268. FBuitrago, 1:94. FCuéllar, 43. FPeñafiel, 1:90. FTrujillo, f. 50r. Neither Ávila nor Atienza have this provision. All of the rest specify widows maintaining their status, but Arévalo and Cuéllar note that this was valid until the eldest child reached eighteen. The chronicle of the reign of Alfonso X also notes the concern for the shortage of horses and horseman in its account of the year 1263. "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:10.

17.  FBurgos, 1:99. FBuitrago, 1:95. FCuéllar, 44. FPeñafiel, 1:91. Valdeavellano, Historia de las instituciones, 251. Arévalo, Ávila, Trujillo and Atienza lack this provision.

18.  "Concesión a burgueses, marineros y ballesteros alicantinos," 52-53. "Privilegio rodado de Alfonso X a Cartagena," 3:54.

19.  "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X de Escalona, 5 marzo 1261," 1:178-80. "Privilegio del Rey Alfonso X, reformando, a petición del concejo de Escalona, 23 junio 1261," 1:187. "Varias exenciones a los caballeros de Madrid,"169-70. FBurgos, 1:97-98. FBuitrago, 1:93-94. FPeñafiel, 1:89-90. The fuero of Arévalo included a four-month period in which a caballero might replace a horse which had died while still retaining his status, which now appears at Escalona and Madrid, as well. Arévalo also included the provision of excuses for hueste service (four), the contribution of a tent (five) and a loriga de cavallo (six). In many ways it seems to be the precursor in 1256 of this later group. It should be noted that St. John the Baptist's nativity was celebrated on June 24, but his beheading was celebrated on August 29. The earlier date was the more frequently celebrated one in the thirteenth century and I think the June date is the more likely one here. FArévalo, 1:267-68.

20.  The town of Sanabria in northwestern Leon bordering on Galicia received a fuero in 1263 which, while it bore no other connection to the Ordenamiento de 1256 group, indicated the continued survival of the liberal Leonese tradition of random excuses for military service. "El fuero de Sanabria," 13:286. Also, an interesting law giving four excuses to caballeros with a horse and family dwelling in a house within the town appears in three of the later Cuenca family charters at Baeza, Iznatoraf and the town which received the Bibliothèque d'Arsenal version. FBa, 916. FI, 885. MS8331, 769.

21.  "Privilegio otorgado por D. Alfonso X a Ávila, 22 abril 1264," 2:492.

22.  This addition was similarly granted to Peñafiel and Cuéllar, from the archives of which the grant to Extremadura survives in two examples. "Ordenamiento de leyes para el Reyno de Extremadura, en Sevilla, 1264, "MSS 9-21-7, 4032, no. 4, ff. 6r, 7r, 9r (the Peñafiel version). "Alfonso X de Castilla, a petición de los habitantes de la villas de Extremadura, desagravia a los de Cuéllar, 1264," 61-64. There was one indication in an undated document pertaining to his reign that Alfonso tried to make this a general rule for all of the caballeros fijosdalgos in his realm. Ordenamiento que fizo el Rey D. Alonso en el Corte de León; Este es el Fuero de los fijosdalgo, MSS 1.3081, ff. 267-68. In its simplist form, this law goes back to the twelfth century in Portuguese and Toledan fueros (see Chapter Two). For an extensive examination of the development of the urban caballero class, see Pescador, 33-34:101-238, 35-36:56-201, 37-38:88-198,39-40:169-260.

23. "Provisión del Rey D. Alfonso X a Madrid, Sevilla, 27 agosto 1264," 1:59-65. Ladero Quesada, Historia de Sevilla, 143-47. Concern for lack of equipment and reluctant concejo service is also revealed for this period in Alfonso's Chronicle. "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:10,40-41.

24.  "Cr nica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:6,9. AMC, 17:197-200. For modern accounts of the Salé and Niebla campaigns in English, see: Bishko, "Reconquest," 3:434; Lomax, Reconquest, 160-61; and O'Callaghan, History of Medieval Spain, 364.

25.  "Concesión al concejo de Orihuela, 1265," 28. Carta a Cáceres por Alfonso X, 12 febrero 1273, MSS 430, f. 56. Floriano Cumbreño, ed., Documentación histórica del Archivo Municipal de Cáceres, 21. "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, eximiendo a los caballeros fijosdalgo de Sevilla y a los ciudadanos de ella que tuvieren caballo y armas, del servicio de moneda," 1:293. This does not seem to have prevented the weapons inspections in the Campo de Tablada cited by Ladero Quesada, Historia, 143-47. The Burgos militia was also mustered: "Al concejo de Burgos, 1266," Doc 595, 1088.

26.  "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, concediendo a Valladolid," 1:225-27. The editor gives this a date of 1295, but 1265 is almost certainly the date, given the place of this document in the chronological order of the documents in the collection with Alfonso X as the grantor.

27.  "Privilegio rodado de Alfonso X a los pobladores de Murcia, Sevilla, 14 mayo 1266," 1:19-20. Torres Fontes, "Jaime I y Alfonso X, dos criterios," 2:329-40. "Infante don Manual confirma a Elche sus privilegios," 2:32.

28.  "Alfonso X concede tierras y exenciones en Requena," 166-67. "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:21. The chronicle dates this in 1272. "Carta del Rey D. Alonso X exortando a la paz al concejo de Escalona, 1269," 1:254.

29.  The Córtes held at Jérez in 1268 did consider the price of arms in the kingdom, but of such an elaborate and expensive kind that this could have had but little implication for the average municipal militiaman. "Córtes de Jérez de 1268," 1:70-71. Carta a Cáceres, 1273, f. 56. "Privilegio de Sevilla, 6 June 1273," 1:293. "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, eximiendo a los de Córdoba de la moneda forera," 2:27. FBa, 20-25. There seems no limit in time on the Seville grant, but Córdoba's is limited to seven years. For a survey of Alfonso's pursuit of the imperial crown and its impact on his domestic policies, see O'Callaghan, History of Medieval Spain, 362-75.

30.  "Privilegio del Rey D. Alfonso X, en que condonando a la villa de Aguilar de Campo," 1:314-15. This particular document is dated October 30, 1276.

31.  "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:23, 40-41, 43, 50-51, 53-54, 57-58. "Carta del infante don Sancho, hijo de Alfonso X, al concejo de Burgos," 1117, Doc. 1179.

32.  "Cesión de los castillos de Puentes y Felí a Lorca, 1265," 178; also reprinted in Torres Fontes, Repartimiento de Lorca, 57-60. "Privilegio de Alfonso X al concejo de Lorca, eximiéndoles del quinto de las cabalgadas, 1265," 68. "Alfonso X al concejo de Lorca, concesión del castello de Cella," 34. Torres Fontes also produces a grant of the castles of Puentes and Felí to Lorca dated 23 marzo 1257 in his Colección de documentos de Murcia, 3:41-43, which suggests that the 1265 grant may have been a re-grant or confirmation.

33.  "Privilegio de Murcia, 14 mayo 1266," 1:19-20. "Alfonso X a los concejos de Mula y Molina Seca," 1:39. "Ordenamiento de Alfonso X al concejo de Murcia, 15 mayo 1267," 1:42-43. For an analysis of the defensive system in Murcia, see the comments of Torres Fontes, Colección de documentos de Murcia, 1:65-84.

34.  "Privilegio del Rey Alfonso X, concediendo a los caballeros de linage que fueren a Arcos de la Frontera," 1:240.

35.  "Carta de la hermandad celebrada entre los concejos de Córdoba, Jaén, Baeza, ..., 26 abril 1265," 1:222-23. "Carta de la hermandad celebrada entre los concejos de Córdoba, Jaén, Baeza, ..., 10 mayo 1282," 1:72-74. "Carta de la hermandad de los concejos de Córdoba, Jaén, Baeza, ..., 10 mayo 1282," 1:74-75. García-Gallo, Manual de historia del derecho español, 2:936. "El cabildo de Salamanca otorga carta de hermandad con el concejo de Cuenca," 487-88. "Carta de los hermandades de Castilla, León, Galicia, Extremadura, Toledo y Andalucía reunidas en Medina del Campo," 494-96. Puyol y Alonso, Las hermandades de Castilla y León, 7-22. For a more recent overview of the hermandades, see Suárez Fernández, "Evolución histórica de las hermandades castellanas," 15-16:5-78. Both the chronicle of Alfonso X and the Crónica of Loaysa recount the Córdoban incident. See: "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:63, and Jofré de Loaysa, Crónica de los reyes de Castilla, 106-07.

36.  "Llibre dels feits del Rei En Jaume," 397, 498.

37.  FTL, 8, 10. FTR, 6, 8. FAlbR, 6-7. The requirement is for a saddle horse, shield and lance, and the romance version of Teruel adds a metal helmet. For a good overview of the interaction of the various kinds of municipal law in the Crown of Aragon, see: Font Ríus, "El desarollo general del derecho," 7:289-326.

38.  Costumbres de Lérida, 48.

39.  "Privilegio en que el rey (Jaime I) sanciona los estatutos de Daroca, 1256," 35-36. Privilegios y ordenanzas otorgados a los aldeanos de Daroca, MSS J-III-21, ff. 140-44v. "Jaime I de Aragón absuelve al concejo de Zaragoza de su petición, 3 diciembre 1257," 190. "Jaime I de Aragón concede al concejo de Zaragoza, 16 mayo 1266," 218. "Carta de Jaime I de Jaca, 1249," 367, and "Carta de Jaime I a Jaca, 1269," 383.

40.  Llibre del Repartiment de Valencia, 17-72, 323-435. Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, "El 'Repartiment'," 2:18-21. The trans-Pyrenees town of Montpellier also received lands, but attained occupation rates similar to those of the Catalan towns.

41.  Gual Camarena, "Estudio de la territorialidad," 3:262-89.

42.  Font Ríus, Cartas, 1:338-39, 1:414 (this a five-year exemption, followed by military service thereafter), 1:415. Huici Miranda and Desamparados Cabanes Pecourt, eds., Documentos de Jaime I, 1:269, 378. Huici Miranda, ed., Colección diplomática de Jaime I, 197, 435, 827-29. Alart, 181-82. The preceding are the documentary references to 1251 which grant exemptions from military service. The following documentary citations prior to 1252 which require it. Font Ríus, Cartas, 1:343, 345, 349, 354-55, 375, 378, 384, 403, 405, 409, 426, 428. Huici-Desamparados, Documentos de Jaime I, 1:356, 2:122-23, 333. Alart, 155-56, 175. Notice should also be taken of one remarkable exception in the restriction of Cordilleran law from the Catalan plain, when the Fuero de Sepúlveda was awarded to Morella, presumably with its military requirement intact. "Carta-puebla de Morella de Don Blasco de Alagón, 26 abril 1233," 3:517-18.

43.  Font Ríus, Cartas, 1:437, 439, 447, 449, 450, 469, 488. Alart, 215, 261. Bofarull, Colección, 8:135. Aragó and Costa, eds., Privilegios reales, 6. Foguet and Foguet Marsal, eds., Código de las costumbres escritas de Tortosa, I:1:5.

44.  "Llibre dels feits," Ch. 401, 403, 443, 458. Mutaner, "Crònica de Ramon Muntaner," Ch. 13.

45.  "Jaime I de Aragón, comunica al concejo de Zaragoza, 15 julio 1274," 239-40. "Jaime I comunica al concejo de Zaragoza, 23 julio 1274," 240-41. "Jaime I solicita de la ciudad de Zaragoza, 8 Septiembre 1274," 241-42.

46.  "Jaime I mandó exercitum civitatibus," 1150. "Orden del Rey Jaime por carta a las ciudades," 1152. "Misit litteras dominus Rex Jacobus hominibus villarum," 1158.

47.  "El rei Jaume I mana als homes de los viles i ciutats," 3:476. Orden a los oficiales de als aldeas de Daroca, January, 1276, Rg. 39, f. 133v.

48.  "Pedro I concede carta 'Princeps namque'," 88-89. Duran i Sanpere,"Defensa de la ciutat," 312-13. The organization for defense was elaborated rather more clearly over a century later. See: Marsá, ed., Onomástica Barcelonesa del siglo XIV, 3-212.

49.  "Quod tenentes continue equum certi pretii seu valoris, (May 1266)," 183-84. "De confirmatione franquitatis concesse tenentibus equos et armes, (December, 1283)," 187. "Concessio facta ciuitati de muris barbacanis vallis et planis eiusdem, (October, 1259)," 184-85. "Jaime I manda al gubernador de Valencia presentarse con sus tropas en Almudévar, (1 September 1257)," 186-87. Burns, Islam Under the Crusaders, 300-22. Burns, Medieval Colonialism, 138-45.

50.  "Homenaje prestado a D. Jaime por los vecinos de Sadava," 8:133-37.

51.  "Teobaldo I concede fueros a los vecinos de Garitoain, 1236," 171. "Teobaldo I confirma a los collazos escancianos de Urroz, 1237," 186-87. "Teobaldo I exime a los labradores de Galipençu (Gallipienzo)," 188-89. "Teobaldo I da a tributo a los de Taxonar (Tajonar)," 221. "Teobaldo II concede a los pobladores de Torralba," 242. "Perdone al concejo y moradores de Viana, 4 enero 1275," 1:203-04.

52.  The towns receiving the Évora charter are: Setúbal (1249), Aljustrel (1252), Mértola (1254), Aroche (1255), Penegarcia (1256), Alcáçovas (1258), Terena (1262), Tolosa (1262), Portel (1262), Gravão (1267), Seda (1271) and the Muslim residents of Évora in 1273. Of these, Setúbal, Penegarcia and the Évoran Muslims received highly abbreviated versions with the military law missing or untypically expressed. MPH-LC, 1:634, 636, 645-46, 651-52, 667, 689-90, 698-705, 708-09, 720-21, 729-30. The towns receiving the Santarém charter are: Torres Vedras (1250), Beja (1254), Odemira (1256), Monforte (1257), Estremoz (1258), Silves (1266), Aguiar (1269), Vila Viçosa (1270), Évora Monte (1271) and Castro Marim (1277). MPH-LC, 1:634-35, 640-41, 664-66, 670-72, 679-83, 706-08, 712-15, 717-19, 721-23, 734-36. The towns receiving the Trancoso pattern are: Melgaço (1258), Aguiar da Beira (1258), Viana (1258-60), Prado (1261), Monção (1261) and Pena da Rainha (1268). MPH-LC, 1:684-98, 710-12. FSetúbal, 1:634. "Fuero de Cartagena," 23-24. For the general outlines of the population resettlement in Portugal, see: Moxó, Repoblación y sociedad, 283-96. For the Cidadêlhe pattern in the period, see Appendix A.

53.  Fori Antiqui Valentiae, Serrano, ed., 3:1-4, 133:1-27. The more recent and scholarly edition, Furs de València, Colon and Garcia, eds., has not reached the military sections in its progress at this time. Costumbres escrítas de Tortosa, 18-19. "Costumes e foros da Garda,"2:4, 8-9. "Costumes e foros de Santarém," 2:31. "Costumes de Santarém communicados a Villa Nova d'Alvito," 2:48, 50. "Costumes e foros de Beja," 2:61, 66, 69-70. "Costumes de Garvão communicados d'Alcácer," 2:80-81. Oriolla, Évora (which presented two sets of customs as well as its earlier charter with its long-standing military obligations) and Torres Novas had no military content in their Costumes.

54.  Repartiment de Valencia, 17-23, 32-72, 323-27, 329-34, 340-46, 372-82, 405-07, 411-12, 414-15, 424-26, 434-35. Torres Fontes, "Jaime I y Alfonso X," 329-40. Despite this, some Catalan settlement in Murcia did take place. "Crónica del rey Alfonso décimo," 66:11.

55.  "Misit litteras dominus Rex Petrus hominibus villis, (16-17 Febrary 1285)," Reg. 43, ff. 106r-108v, 118r-118v. I am indebted to Fr. Robert I. Burns for these particular archival references. "Crònica de Ramon Mutaner," Ch. 10. "Carta de Pedro III de Aragón a los alamines y aljamas de Sarracenos del reino de Valencia," 188-89. Burns, Medieval Colonialism, 144.

56.  Bishko, "The Castilian as Plainsman," 53ff. Hillgarth, The Spanish Kingdoms, 1:21-26. Moxó, Repoblación, 349-82.